Gadroc

Actually this is way over kill for backlighting which is the only real need for PWM in the cockpit. The TLC5940 takes a lot of pins to work and consumes 3 PWM lines on the Arduino proper. I would recommend just using one PWM out put and run it into a simple transistor to drive a source 5v line directly to the LEDs. Since you want all of your panel backlights to dim at the same level anyways your wasting a lot of lines, PWM and board space to use a TLC5940. You will have to put your own limiting resistors in line if you go this route.

Nice on the CMSP OCR. I'd love to use that if your willing to share.

I also did the oculus kick starter if you need another.

I need the same kind of screen mounts as I'm planning on having the two side screens in portrait as well.. Mind sharing your design?

Keyboard is auto added for each profile, so you don't have to.

Select the Control you want to map to a keyboard command. Select the output tab in the bindings. Find Send Keys onto the Trigger Event you want to send the keyboard command. Select static value for the output and enter the keyboard command into the text box. There should be basic help text on screen telling you the special character entry options.

Looks very interesting. You have pictures of any prototypes?

Tom that looks like the stuff I use for my panels. It's LaserMax by Rowmark.

Nice job! Is the white ring really raised like that on the real thing? I thought it was just white outline on the panel.

Excellent. I have a 7970 now as well... but got it after 12.8 so might not have been able to reproduce ;)

The CMSP panel I did is essentially an Arduino stripped down of unnecessary circuits and interfaced to Helios via the EOS Protocol. It's pretty simple to talk to those displays and send them text via libraries included with the Arduino software stack. Keep in mind that they have limited graphics capability (I think they can only load 7 custom characters). For the caution panel you'll need either an IO Expander, LED Driver or do some multiplexing of the LEDs. The A-10C Caution panel requires 48 individually controller LED channels. For the caution panel you don't need to control brightness so an IO Expander is ideal as they are easy to use. I would look at the MCP2301* series of chips for this purpose. Easy two wire interface (I2C) to communicate with the Arduino again with built in libraries and they come in DIP packages making DIY circuit boards and prototyping possible. The one thing you need to keep in mind is total mA drain through the IO Expander (or Arduino for that matter). When all 16 output pins of the MCP23018 are active you'll be pulling 320mA through that chip (assuming standard 20mA LEDs) or more if you hook up two LEDs per indicator. For this purpose look at the MCP23018 which is a high current version of the more common MCP23017. With this chip you should be able to just grab a few bus resistors and hook the LEDs straight up. To do a full caution panel you'll need 3 MCP23018 to get enough addressable pins (you won't have enough pins on the Arduino itself after hooking up I2C and PC Communications). This is fairly cheap chip so not a big deal, but it can consume a lot of space for 3 28 pin DIPs (again the caution panel is fairly big and has the space. The only downside is you pay by the square inch for the PCB manufacturing. You could look at multiplexing to fix that. Multiplexing would use a single MCP23018, but couple it with 3 transistor driven by pins off the Arduino. Each pin of the MCP is connected to three LEDs and those leds are connected to ground via one of the three transistors. Your firmware then turns off all the MCP pins, turns on one of transistors and then outputs the signals for those LEDs. It then turns everything off and turns on the second transistor and outputs the state for those... etc. Just keep looping through that real fast and you essentially triple your output with out pulling more than available current through the MCP. This gives you fewer transistor/parts on the board but more complicated firmware.

Very nice!

I picked up a 7970 and did a full reinstall on my pit last night. I need to get the touch screen all hooked up and configured today and I'll try and replicate as well.

Helios doesn't do anything fancy with graphics APIs at all. I use native WPF (Microsofts latest graphics toolkit for C#) rendering components completely. I can only guess that the load from DCS and Helios is triggering a bug in the video drivers.

In practice three views works nicely in BlackShark as you don't need to pan up and down as much (assuming you have a Helios or physical cockpit). You don't really need to use TrackIR in this setup. Although I abandoned it for the better performance of one view. A-10C is a different story. The wide view with TrackIR works better all the way as you always need your head on a swivel and need to look straight up and your six. Also for folks trying it a three view setup works best with around 90 degree angle between center and side screens. Single view with TrackIR works better with a max of a 45 degree angle.

You can do this, but there is a large performance hit. In my layout posted above I used one external view port with about a 140-160 degree field of view. It is not side views though. If you go above a single view with 160 FOV the rendering engine goes belly up and renders about 0.25 frames per second. To get side views you need to configure side views you need to configure three view ports. This causes more of a performance hit than a 140 FOV, but doesn't choke. The performance hit is due to the engine now essentially rendering three cameras instead of one.

I think he was indicating it was not a good idea to put a cutout dash in front of a touch screen. I would agree as it would make the touch screen hard to use. Several folks have put Helios on non-touch screens behind a cut out dash to great effect.

Depends on how far you want to go. I did my first several panels all in Corel draw, but I'm moving them all into full 3D cad for future design. I've bitten myself a few times by not actually modeling the switches and accounting for enough space behind the panel as well. I've started using Alibre Personal Edition ($200) which is a parametric cad system for all my panel and cockpit work now. I've been very happy. Sketch up is not a great option in my opinion. It's inability to export true arcs can cause problems with CNC machines.

Yes.. Only one program can talk to the phidget board at time. You should just be able to close the Phidgets interface tab in the editor and it will disconnect.

One other thing you need to be careful of is TrackIR. If you start TrackIR before Helios or the Phidgets control panel TrackIR will "lock up" the Phidgets board.

Big +1!! There are many of us who have invested a lot of time, effort and money to have some really incredible immersion. Please make sure the features you've introduced that let both multi-monitor, touchscreen and full hardware pits work don't take steps backwards!

Ahh sorry. You extract the preset channel number the same way you do with the dial info. If you are just pulling the currently tuned frequency instead of pulling the dial position you will run into problems.

I believe these are can be configured in the mission. There was discussion earlier about how to extract mission data and use in a Helios profile. Not sure how far anyone got with it, but here is a thread about it.

Nice looking setup! Keep in mind that you can add a second video card to run the side screens. As long as you don't expand the DCS window to display on them there is little to know performance hit to display Helios only screens on them.

Clear your cache. He has DB problems they fixed the redirect but data is missing from the last several months.